Supporting cities in planning restoration of small streams that will improve the quality of life of residents, increase biodiversity and contribute to climate change adaptation

The project focuses on the restoration of urban streams using nature-friendly solutions. Although many (scientific) studies show that revitalised streams bring many benefits (from flood mitigation, biodiversity restoration, cooling of cities to recreational and aesthetic functions), their restoration using nature-based solutions is still not a common practice in the context of urban areas.  Indeed, in practice, stream restoration faces a number of obstacles. There is limited space in intensively built-up areas, complicated property rights to surrounding land, or a lack of public and stakeholder awareness of the benefits that restored watercourses provide. The aim of the project is therefore to help cities to simplify the planning and implementation of restoration measures by using interdisciplinary approaches, engaging the professional and lay public and exchanging experiences. The project involves scientific partners from Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and the Netherlands and the cities of Dresden, Jablonec nad Nisou, Senica and Poznan, where the knowledge gained in the project will be implemented in practice.

In the project, IEEP will be responsible for a work package aimed at integrating ecological, social, institutional and urban planning aspects of urban stream restoration.

Supporting cities and regions in Central Europe to develop and implement climate change adaptation strategies

The aim of the Climate_CRICES project is to increase the capacity of public authorities to cope with the expected impacts of climate change, such as heat waves and drought, water scarcity and flooding, and impacts on biodiversity. The challenge addressed in this project is to make use of the big amount of environmental, water and meteorological data available both within public institutions and from so far practically unused data sources (e.g. remote sensing data). By bringing them together on a single multilingual platform, municipalities, regions, agencies and research institutions from Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Italy will be able to increase the resilience of rural and urban areas to the impacts of climate change through more efficient and accurate analysis and forecasting. In cooperation with partners in Poland and Germany, it will then be easier to address climate change adaptation issues on a cross-border basis. 

As part of the project, IEEP will pilot the needs of the Liberec region and selected municipalities in the region, identify barriers to the development and implementation of adaptation strategies, and provide access to existing portals so that data can be integrated into a common Central European platform.

How to design an appropriate internal layout of agricultural land taking into account the ecosystem services provided. 

The aim of the project is to develop methods for optimising the internal layout of agricultural land, including zonation methods within soil sub-blocks (LPIS) in the context of effective application of precision agriculture and ensuring the diversity of agricultural landscapes. The optimisation also includes the design of environmental-technical areas where there is a requirement to enhance the environmental functions of the landscape. The methods must take into account the technical requirements of agricultural techniques, crop rotation principles, economics, but also aspects of the functional natural environment, soil and water conservation. The project will result in a set of methods for optimising the internal layout of LPIS, including an assessment of their impact on agrotechnical operations, ecosystem services, and in terms of future agricultural requirements, i.e. the possibility of CO2 fixation, and increased landscape stability. 

The IEEP team will be responsible for the economic assessment of the measures in the project. An integral part of this will be the consideration and valuation of externalities in the form of ecosystem services and costs of the measures. By implementing economic methods (cost-benefit analysis/multicriteria analysis) to determine the overall/sub-impacts, the suitability of the different options for implementing the measures will be assessed.

Comparison of the impact of conventional and organic farming on the provision of ecosystem services and formulation of arguments for adjusting the setting of support for organic farming.

The project aims to compare the impact of conventional and organic farming on the provision of ecosystem services, using own research, available data and literature. Ecosystem services whose provision is crucial both for the long-term resilience of agrarian ecosystems and for maintaining the resilience of the whole environment will be quantified. By quantifying ecosystem services in biophysical units (in conventional and organic farming) and their subsequent assessment, including life cycle assessment of selected agricultural products, the hitherto insufficiently under-considered added value of organic farming production in relation to the ecosystem services will be analyzed. Arguments and recommendations for (adjusting) the setting of organic farming support in accordance with the Czech Action Plan of organic farming and other related documents will be formulated.